Musicians are the largest group of songwriters in the independent music industry
Here, here, Julian Lawton!
People who write songs in order to sell them are of course going to be concerned about what the major record companies and music publishers are doing because those companies are their customers. However, I think that the largest group of songwriters are the people who write and perform their own music, and many (if not all) of these issues apply to them as much as to people who try to make a living by selling songs they've written. The mechanical royalty rate paid to songwriters in the UK is 8.5 percent of the dealer price (the price the retailer gets from the label) on physical product and 12 percent on digital (which is has been officially discounted to 8% for years), that 8-ish percent is added to whatever the artist's share of a band's sales royalties. Depending on the size of the band and the way they have decided to divide things amongst themselves, that can be a significant bonus to the songwriting members of a band. In the (truly) independent sector, it's normal for artists to get 50 percent or more of all sales profits after the label "recoups" the manufacturing and promotional costs from a particular release. That means that once those costs are covered it's often an even split between the artist and the label, although some deals favour the artist even more. This is clearly not how major labels do business.
No one's really sure how much money the industry's losing through illegal downloads, but if the sales figures of the independent record labels are anything to go by, there is definitely a very significant effect. Of course the preferred "channels" of music delivery are different for the current generation of "digital natives", leaving labels like the one I work for wondering how to create new revenue streams and "monetise" the commodity that music has become. Our artists have been hard hit by this mainly because independents don't have the market share (i.e. massive sales) to cushion themselves from the blows of financial reality. And most independent artists aren't really “brands” that can be used to sell other things like, er... car insurance
Biting the hand that feeds IT
